Periodically I get requests from the above to respond to a survey of residents in my region. I hate surveys anyway, but I am very suspicious of this one, so I marked it as spam. Again, and again, and again. It still shows up as apparently legitimate mail in my In box. As far as I know, this is the only case where me marking as spam has not worked for future emails.
I would really like to spike this site out of my sight. Any ideas?
eta: I also have marked “unsubscribe” which, of course, does not work.
Hitting “unsubscribe” in the missive merely tells them that they’ve got a real person on the other end, and can be a note to either keep trying or, worse, sell your email to others as a probable hit.
It may be a “real” Qualtrics survey, but, as far as you and I are concerned, it is fucking spam, and you may absolutely blacklist the domain on your end.
Sounds like an issue with your spam filter? E.g. the Bayesian ones might require several samples before they confidently reject the domain as spam every time.
Without knowing what kind of computer(s) and phone(s) you use for email and what email provider you use, there’s not a lot of specific advice we can give.
What exactly does “I marked it as spam” mean? What did you click where?
Yeah, this doesn’t seem to be a job for a spam filter, since it’s always the same sender. If you’re using an email client you can normally create a message rule. In this case, I’d create one to send any message with that address in the From header to the trash.
Windows 10, Opera browser, Comcast native email application. If I select an email (there is a select box at the left which does not mark the email as “read”), and click on the button at the top which has the label “Mark as spam and report phishing,” the email is sent unread to my spam folder, and future emails from the “real address” of that email are sent to the spam folder automatically. Usually.
Thank you, that appears to be the reason why my usual spam tactic does not work for this sending address.
Thank you, I don’t think I have tried that. I have never had to resort to a manual filter rule for spam, but I don’t mind doing it if it works.
Thank you, it’s a fairly straightforward process, and I have now done it. I have elected to transfer the email to Spam rather than Trash, hoping that (per @DavidNRockies’ reference) it will ding the sender. It may not, but no harm done either way I guess.
Just some additional info: I suspect the “mark as spam” algorithm is not programmed to specifically send all further emails from that address to your spam folder. It looks for patterns in the email that would allow it to identify it as spam. It’s just that, usually, the sender is signal.
This particular address, being so often a legitimate email source, that signal is probably not considered sufficient to distinguish spam from non-spam.
I actually wound up with the opposite problem. Apparently enough people had marked a particular set of emails as spam, or I accidentally marked one, that I stopped getting emails from a crowdfunding game I had backed, and almost missed out getting my reward as it is finally coming out.
I suspect based on my knowledge of how spam filters work. Those buttons never directly block the sender. Doing so would not be useful, as a spammer could just use a different email every time. What they do is tell the algorithm to weight similar posts as being more likely spam.
And no, my post actually aligns entirely with his post. A lot of legitimate mail comes from that address, therefore you marking it as spam is not considered a sufficient signal to always move all subsequent emails from that address to your spam folder.
If it worked the way you indicated in your first post, you would not have had to create a manual filter, as marking as spam would be equivalent.
The link talked about “noreply@” some legitimate server being a way to get spam email through regular filters. It’s a special case.
And I did not say that marking something as spam blocks a sender. It only blocks the address. That’s the most I can really hope for, and using it has greatly reduced the volume of spam that has gotten through to my IN box. My OP was about why it didn’t work to block a certain address.
The ISP’s spam filter may indeed do what you say about looking for patterns. It clearly doesn’t always work, even in what are to me obvious cases.
“Never” is a word that should not be used often. I support two different products that include a spam filter, and in my experience no two spam filters work the same. One of them will forever mark messages with that envelope sender or From header value as spam without question when sent to that specific recipient. The other will only add that email address to a list where its presence will increase the spam score for all recipients on that tenant. It won’t directly convict like the other product will, but it will make a conviction more likely.
Both of them have features available to the administrator to ditch all messages from a specific sender no matter who the recipient is, but those aren’t available to the end users.
